Get a Grip, R, Gaius/Gaius
(Author's note: BSG, Gaius/Gaius, R, 1185 words. Some vague spoilers for the early part of Season 4, but nothing huge I don't think. This is a rather silly story I dashed off today since I needed to get it out of my head in order to work on other, more important things. Nevertheless, I hope it amuses someone.)


It was like looking into a mirror with just a slight curve or ripple to it, so his reflection came back to him subtly different in ways he couldn't quite pin down. The hair, the clothes were both better-groomed but that wasn't all. His double was pulled together in less superficial ways as well, because he didn't seem like he was constantly floundering on the inside, making everything up as he went along. He seemed like he knew what he was doing and why he was there, even if Gaius himself had no frakking clue.

Currently, most of the cult members he seemed to have somehow acquired were off doing whatever cult members did when they weren't praying or frakking or gazing at him adoringly. Probably refining tylium ore or repairing waste-reclamation processors or something similarly unpleasant – because really, one's life would have to be fairly awful before Gaius could possibly seem like a valid saviour, or at least that was his privately-held opinion.

Well, semi-privately, if that other him counted as a separate person. He wasn't so sure about that, though.

Right now, for instance, the other Gaius was perched on the edge of his pile-of-cushions bed. He'd been there since he woke up, but Gaius – the real Gaius, that is – was trying to ignore him. It wasn't working out so well.

"Most of them know you're a fraud, you know."

"Then why do they keep coming here?" he muttered, keeping his voice low in case any of his followers happened to be within earshot.

"Because they also know you're less of a fraud than any of the other leaders they might choose to follow. Because, deep inside, everyone knows they're a fraud, and you speak to that fear in your own strange little fashion. Oh, and probably some of them came because they hoped they might get to frak you," he added, almost as an afterthought.

"I did notice there are about ten times as many women here as there are men," Gaius admitted.

"Yes, well, you didn't think that was a coincidence, did you?" His doppleganger tipped his head to one side, contemplatively. "And most of the men are gay."

"Really?"

"Oh, definitely. I mean, a few are probably drawn here by the sheer concentrated pussy – to pick up your leavings, if you will – but most of them are hoping you'll want a bit of variety eventually."

Gaius grimaced. "It's not really my thing."

"There was that time at math camp, when you were fifteen…"

"That's not the same! And how do you even know…? Oh, frak it. You're my own personal dementia, of course you know everything I know."

"I'm not a hallucination."

"A manifestation of my subconscious, then, trying to sabotage me."

His mirror image shrugged. "Believe that if it makes you sleep easier."

"It doesn't."

"I know." He had that annoying smirk on his face again. Gaius hoped he didn't look quite so smug when he knew he was right, but somehow he suspected he did.

"If you're not a hallucination, then prove it," he challenged him.

"How, precisely, would you suggest I do that?"

"See, that's just what a hallucination would say. You can't prove it."

"You didn't think your Six was imaginary, did you? A delusion?"

"I…" Gaius hesitated. "At first, I thought she might be."

"And what finally convinced you otherwise?"

"Plenty of things. She came out with things I could never have thought of on my own. She knew what was going to happen… she…"

"She frakked you."

Gaius stuck his chin out. "It wasn't that, it…"

"And it didn't feel like you were doing it to yourself, did it."

"…No," he admitted, after a moment's delightful reminiscence.

"Right then," said the other Gaius, settling down onto the pillows beside him. He had, Gaius realized, done that disconcerting thing where his clothing suddenly changed, except in this case it had changed to, well, nothing.

"Wait a minute!" He scrambled back, but bumped up against the bulkhead and found he had nowhere else to go. "This is ….amazingly wrong, even for me."

"But you have to admit, you didn't expect it. Is this something your subconscious would do to you?" His double arched a suggestive eyebrow.

"Maybe," Gaius said, struggling to look anywhere but at himself. "We were, after all, just talking about that, ah, that time, and perhaps it brought up certain…memories, and… Good lord, do I actually look like that?!"

"I know, what are all those women thinking, eh?" His other self shook his head, bemused. "As an aside, if I were a figment of your imagination, don't you think I'd be a little bit more, well, impressive?" He stroked himself lazily. "I mean, it’s not shabby, don't get me wrong, but not really the stuff legends are made of."

"I've never had any complaints," said Gaius stiffly. "About that, anyway," he amended.

"No, well, of course. Not to your face. And you know what they say – it's what you do with it that counts." He grinned slyly and took Gaius by the hand. "So show me what you can do."

Gaius jerked back. "Absolutely not! It's depraved, disgusting, it's…"

His double shrugged. "If you're right and I'm just some projection of your fractured little mind, then it's no worse than masturbation. Come on, Gaius, get a grip on yourself," he said, far too cheerfully, and reached out to take him in hand.

To his surprise, after a moment or two of awkwardness, Gaius found he was responding to his double's – his own? – touch. "Fine. But I absolutely draw the line at kissing," he warned him as he grudgingly followed suit, wrapping his hand around something that felt eerily familiar and yet, at the same time, wasn't. There was something vertiginous about the experience of jerking himself off from the other side, like an out-of-body experience gone strangely awry.

It really wasn't anything like masturbation; he had to admit that much. Like with anyone, there were the occasional moments when his partner's grip wasn't quite what he would have preferred had he been doing it himself, too rough, say, or too slow. But there were also those wonderful, dizzying flashes – plenty of them, as it happened – when the fact that it was someone else's hand on him, giving him what he hadn't known he wanted until that precise second, made it feel infinitely better than anything he could have done on his own. He ground his hips steadily against his double's fist, shoulders hunched, their legs slowly entangling themselves, until finally they came – together, of course.

"I sincerely hope," said the other Gaius afterwards, "that we'll have no more of this hallucination talk."

"My word on it," Gaius agreed, settling back onto the cushions, arms folded behind his head. "Perhaps," he continued playfully, "you're a succubus. Wait, what's the male version of a succubus? Is it an incubus? You can be that, if you'd rather – oh, bugger, he's gone again. Well, no matter. I'm sure he'll be back again, at some amazingly inconvenient moment."

That night, Gaius slept more soundly than he had in ages.